“Syme was not only dead, he was abolished, an unperson.”

Regarding the Birthers

You know, the nuts who are convinced that Obama was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible to be the President. For reasons that are unclear to be at this time, they are getting more traction in the news. Lou Dobbs, I’m looking at you. The first mistake I would advise you not to make is to assume that this is just a few isolated nutcases. As Ben Smith points out, we live in a nation where surveys show 34% believe in UFOs and 24% believe in witches. I’d love to see the poll numbers on Birther-ism, but I doubt it would be that different from the more than 10% who say Obama is a Muslim.

I consider it to be mostly a cognitive dissonance response. I’m sure most of these people still cannot believe we elected Barack Obama president. So therefore we didn’t, because he isn’t actually eligible to be president. And when he actually releases evidence, as he did when he released his certificate of live birth below, they double down and insist that instead of proving Obama was born in Hawaii, it proves he was reallly born in Kenya because it must be a fake.

Just kidding. Factcheck.org does a good job of showing the actual evidence, including the real certificate and the local newspaper birth announcements back from 1961. So what do the birthers claim to want? After all, Obama seems to have already done what they say they want: release the damn certificate. The newest bullshit seems to be that instead of releasing a digital copy to Daily Kos, they’d like the original paper copy from Hawaii. It’s a ridiculous request, since the state switched from paper records to digital copies as their official records, and since Factcheck saw the original already. But in addition to those legitimate reasons, this deserves no further response from the White House for at least two pragmatic reasons, one of which is quite cynical. They will never be satisfied by more evidence anyway, and second, even if they were, the more the Birthers flail in the wind, the more ridiculous and marginalized the GOP base becomes.